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During his senior year in college, Cuomo shyly introduced himself to a popular, curly-haired girl named Matilda Raffa. She remembers him as serious and religious, the kind of boy, her mother told her, who would never hurt her. Andrew Cuomo recalls how when he first started dating, his father told him not to forget that the girl he was taking out that night was somebody's sister. When Cuomo proposed to Matilda, he was in his first year of law school; she remembers that he gave her a lecture on the Catholic Church's teaching about birth control.
At law school, Cuomo impressed his classmates and teachers as an intellectual duelist of fiendish cleverness. Arguing with Cuomo is like arm wrestling with an opponent who has some built-in advantage: it is hard to get any leverage. He tied for first in his graduating class and was chosen to serve as a legal assistant for a judge on the New York State Court of Appeals. He spent his time staying up late to ponder legal briefs and commuting to Queens on weekends from Albany.
After two years, Cuomo sent out dozens of letters to top-drawer Manhattan law firms. A friend urged him in applying to use his more Anglicized middle name, Matthew, rather than Mario, advice he did not take. Cuomo was rejected by every firm. He was stung. He saw their response as a clear example of prejudice against Italian Americans, and it confirmed his sense of himself as an outsider. He took a job instead with a firm in Brooklyn and gravitated toward trial work. He loved the verbal jousting, the sweet certainty that preparation paid off.
By this time, he and Matilda had had four of their five children and were living in the five-bedroom Cape Cod-style house in Holliswood, Queens, that Andrea Cuomo had built for them. Cuomo was his papa's boy: he worked all the time. But he grew restive. He needed a cause and found one in a group of blue- collar, mostly Italian families from Corona, Queens, who were trying to prevent the city from tearing down their houses for a new school. After six years, Cuomo won a compromise that saved nearly all the homes.
His advocacy impressed Mayor John Lindsay, who asked Cuomo to mediate a dispute in Forest Hills, where middle-class, mostly Jewish families were opposed to the construction of high-rise public housing for low-income, mostly black families. Many political observers saw the assignment as political suicide, but for Cuomo it was a moral conundrum come to life, a test of neighborhood values versus civil rights. What Cuomo learned was that coming up with a simple, Solomonic solution (he proposed halving the size of the project) was a great deal easier than getting both sides to accept it. The resolution he engineered was a way station on the road to progressive pragmatism. The hothead who bruised his knuckles on a catcher's face mask was learning the art of compromise.